Richard's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the favorites-favorites-and-more-favorites dept

This week's favorites post comes from Richard, who's from the UK, but will hopefully forgive my removing of the extraneous "u's" from the word "favorite."

This is the first time I've done the favorites post, so it is a
bit of an adventure for me. I've decided to start with the "Good
News" because there was actually quite a lot of it this week.

Firstly, on the legal front, there have been a number of good
decisions in the courts. In an echo of what happened to ACS law in
the UK earlier in the year Righthaven has been slapped down a number
of times, and there is some
possibility that this could go further than just losing the cases.
There are (as I write) actually three Techdirt stories on this, but
the biggest (and most commented on) is this
one. The key point about this particular story is that the judge has
not just rejected Righthaven for lack of standing, he has also
indicated that even if Righthaven had standing they would
still lose on grounds of fair use. Sadly the comments on this story
are swamped with largely irrelevant arguments, but you can get it down
to a small number of useful contributions by selecting only
insightful comments.

Another kind of good news is when someone who previously had a
reputation for IP maximalism takes a new direction. This category
contains the somewhat unlikely combination of J.K.Rowling
and the Mexican
Congress. The Mexicans have apparently decided to reject ACTA,
which is surprising, given Mexico's extreme copyright length of
life+100. J.K. Rowling's good news is a move into ebooks with no DRM.
Given her previous history, this is something to be celebrated.

Of course, it can't all be good, and so I have decided to institute
the "Victor
Meldrew Award" (for those outside the UK or unfamiliar
with the TV character, his catchphrase was "I don't believe it!"
and the character saw himself as a "normal man in a world full
of idiots"). Righthaven figures in this category too in the
guise of a bizarre
argument made by "Plessy Ferguson" that the
Righthaven rulings somehow threaten Open Source licenses. Clearly the
author of this argument didn't understand Copyright law, Open Source
Licences or the Righthaven ruling because it makes no sense on any of
these counts. Righthaven lost because they attempted to transfer the
right to sue without transferring any other exclusive rights. Opens
source licenses don't even attempt to transfer these rights. The
copyright for each component of an open source system remains with
its original author (unless explicitly assigned to someone else such
as the FSF in a separate transaction). Finally, Copyright law does not
require you to hold the rights to every part of a program in order to
sue for a breach of the license. You only need to hold the rights to
some of it. Sadly, many commenters didn't seem to understand these
points either, so the comments were full of "educational
material"!

On a side issue regarding Righthaven's dealings with Stephens
Media, it seems to me that the transfer of the right to sue only
enables one scenario, which is as follows. Someone infringes on the
Copyright (still held by Stephens Media). Righthaven can't sue them
(according to the court ruling) but what if Stephens media sues them?
Well, they've transferred the "right to sue" to Righthaven -
so now Righthaven can sue Stephens Media for infringement of their
right to sue! The net effect of the legal knot created by the deal is
thus to effectively put the original material into the public domain
because no-one can exert the copyright! I'm pretty sure that wasn't
the intention of Stephens Media when they set this scheme up...

Another
bizarre argument was put forward by a small UK lobbying
organisation, claiming that a lack of software patents was damaging
the UK software industry. Well, apart from the fact that the UK doesin practice
actually have some software patents, the logic here was unbelievable
and the evidence lacking.

After all this
negativity, I thought I would end on a positive note with my personal
favourites from the "DailyDirt" postings. Thesock
sorting robot seemed
appealing, until I realised that the video
is hugely speeded up. So my personal selection here is the post on
Open
Source Hardware. I've long
believed that Open Source software really needs to run on open
hardware, but this video
showed how the collaborative ideal is extending beyond computing into
other fields. Have a look at it. It will cheer you up!

richard your just Mike's teachers pet this week. Will you ever become a techdirt "writer". Is that what your aspiring to be? Well youre doing a good job so far, by being mikes little pet and all

Forget the fact that you have a Ph.D. in physics and and I can barly spell the word physics because nothing I've done even comes close. Forget the fact that Mike can create a successful blog and I can't

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Forget the fact that you have a Ph.D. in physics and and I can barly(correction: barely) spell the word physics because nothing I've done even comes close. Forget the fact that Mike can create a successful blog and I can't

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The Dark Meldrew Award?

"This week saw a "dark Meldrew event" when a woman was arrested by police for filming them from her own property. The antics of the TSA are often in the same vein and would probably win this award quite frequently if it was run every week."

Re: Re: Don't worry he's from the UK..

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And that is why it's always important to check a commenter's username before replying. Because no matter how 100% serious he sounds, I don't think someone named "ShillTroll" actually means what he says ;)